Your brand: if you're not building it, someone else is…
Everyone has a brand, if you’re not intentionally crafting yours, you are leaving it up to others to interpret through the lens of their background search, credit check and social search. That’s not to say that people are going to assume the worst about you. But it does mean that, lacking context, the nuance and details of your brand are out of your control. No successful brand leaves something so important to chance.
An employer’s search will reveal a lot of information about you. Most employers will do at least a credit check, a background check and a dive into your social media presence. This provides a ton of granular information with absolutely zero context.
They have bread crumbs about your financial stability and knowledge, any run-ins you’ve had with the legal system, from parking tickets to marital disputes, to things far more serious. On your social media, they can see not only the things you like and gravitate toward, but the things that get under your skin and the things you seem to spend your time thinking about.
What they have is a few pages filled with dots that represent random moments in your life. The quick snapshot of you provided by that search requires the searcher to fill in the gaps based on their own experience and knowledge of others who may share certain similarities with you.
Let’s say your childhood hero was MacGyver, you love General Tso’s chicken, you live on the golf course and you’re a massive fan of the Yeti Cooler brand. Their favorite person in the world may love MacGyver and General Tso’s chicken. But their least favorite person might be a golf fanatic and a Yeti Cooler enthusiast. Those relationships are going to add color into the gaps. They will be the lines with which they connect those dots.
They don’t know that one of your earliest memories of your dad is him taking you to the golf course and spending the day showing you how to play, or that your brother-in-law works for Yeti, and so you have all that Yeti Stuff because he gave it to you across several birthdays.
And that’s assuming they don’t accidentally find the social media pages of someone who shares your name...
Being intentional with your content allows you to provide context so that your social footprint tells a cohesive story. If you know they are going to search your social media, then you should make it easy for them to find the right social media channels, and those channels should make it easy for them to learn more about the aspects of your personality and experience that are going to make their job easier.
How To Do That :
1. Establish a blog where you can share your professional knowledge and insights.
This is your chance to craft the story you want your prospective employers to see. You not only give them the granular data, but your provide the contextual insights that give that data more meaning. You create a clearer picture of who you are, rather than a vague outline for them to fill in with bits and pieces of other people they know. Be unavoidably you, not a Frankenstein’s Monster built from their own past.
2. Chop this content up to create posts on social media.
Think of your blog as your house. Your social media channels, then, are a giant cocktail party. At the party, don’t be the annoying person who prattles on about themselves all night. Share short, amusing anecdotes, sure. Toss in interesting factoids about random crap when appropriate. Introduce people to each other. Share useful information or entertaining interludes. And then, if you connect with someone, maybe give them your number so they can reach out to you if they’re interested. In this case "your number" is the URL of your website. In social media, you are sprinkling breadcrumbs in the hopes of leading them back to your site.
3. Set up a linktree page, so you can be sure employers find the right social media accounts, and don’t confuse you with someone with the same name.
People will often take the simplest route from point a to point b. If they are doing a dive into your social media, and there happens to be a linktree page that lists your website and all of the applicable social media channels… you just made their job easier. They know they’re looking at your actual profiles, and they can find them all in one central location.
4. Your brand identity should focus less on you and your history than on how you and your history can help your employer.
We’ll get more into this in a future post, but here’s the thing about most hiring managers (and people in general). They aren’t really that interested in you. They are interested in the things that are stressing them out, and they’re hoping you can help make at least some of those things a little less stressful.
If you really want to stand out, most of your content should be about those sorts of problems and issues, and how you have dealt with those issues and solved those problems in the past. OR how skills and past experience you have at least relate to those problems and issues.
At that point, your resume, your interview and your job offer aren’t about you, but about how much better life is going to be after they hire you. That’s not to say you should go in all "I’m the hero you’ve been waiting for." But again, that’s a topic for another article.
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